Hey everyone, I saw this community the other day and was excited to see such a thriving do it yourself community here. Kind of epic that a platform where we can trade ideas and skills AND get paid for it exists. I will probably post here fairly regularly in the future since I seem to always have some project going, to start with I have a quick project I did today in the long tradition of DIYers and craftsmen making their own tools.
Something about making a useful tool is especially satisfying, it's maybe the feeling of your skills multiplying. You learn to use tools to make the things floating around in your head, and then you realize one day you have enough knowledge and skills to build new tools to solve new problems, or better solve problems you had struggled to solve before. It's something that I sometimes feel is missing from our modern society where so much work is done digitally, and so many products are designed to be disposable and closed off to the tinkering impulses of the user; so when I can use my modest fabrication skills to build tools that help work I am doing in the digital world I tend to jump at it.
So rambling introduction aside. I have been tasked recently with digitizing a collection of family photos in the form of Slides and negatives. One option was to spend 150 dollars or more for a commercial slide digitizer, but I felt like I could do the same thing with my phone's camera IF I had a lightbox.
This ended up being about a 2 hour build, low to moderate difficulty, and it could be done entirely with handtools if needed. You will need some type of saw, a straight edge and ruler to mark your cuts, a couple of bar clamps, some wood glue, a hammer, and some finishing nails. I also used some chisels and a rabbit plane to make the phone holding platform, it could have been done without those but I wanted to use up a scrap of lumber I had and it was a bit thicker than I expected.
A lightbox for those who don't know is exactly what it sounds like. It's a box with a light inside and a glasstop, usually the top has a frosted quality or a white coating. Tattoo artists use them to set up stencils, and animators use them to for frame by frame drawing. They are also used quite often by archivists to view slides.
(example of an archivist's Lightbox)
I knew I could use my Ipad as light source, but since I also wanted to get digital copies of the images I needed a way to snap a picture of the backlit slides. I also wanted to make sure my photos were high quality and consistent, so I wanted to have a built in platform to hold my camera in a stable position. I decided on a design with a glass topped box with no bottom that I could slide over my Ipad, with a platform I could set my phone on with the camera facing down towards the box. Luckily I had a nice pane of glass from a different project and some extra sheets of 1/8th inch plywood on hand.
(the materials used after I had cut my individual pieces out, the square frame came from a broken crate, but could have easily been replaced by cutting a few more layers of plywood. I just wanted to use up that scrap crate piece since it was the perfect size.)
Once I had those pieces cut and ready it was a simple matter of glueing them together and securing the pieces with some little finish nails. I clamped the pieces for about an hour, but since I was building this to be a utilitarian object I wasn't especially careful of the aesthetic considerations.
She ain't the prettiest, but she has a lot of character 😁 Now to put this rig to the test.
(mock up using an old broken phone to give a sense of how the set up is laid out.)
And the results were really quite good, I was able to get fairly high definition images of these slides. Here is an example, a picture my grandmother took from a parade held in Grants Pass Oregon in 1959. This is the "Golden Rule" float, apparently the Golden Rule was the name of a department store in the area.
Really happy with the results, and even happier about saving $150, that money will instead help to fuel my addiction to Splinterlands 🤣. But first..... I have about 5,000 more slides to capture 😐
Hope that someone out there finds this useful, and if you have any questions about the project feel free to reply or send me a dm or whatever. Happy to help out where I can. Keep after it everybody, the more you make, the easier it is to make more 👍